Re: [gst-devel] Re: Helix Player virtual team meeting

[Ronald Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Hi Rob,

On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 03:23, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> Fair enough, but I'm not sure how GStreamer really avoids proprietary
> codecs.  Can you explain?

We don't. We simply need to support everything that people will throw at
our media player, even if it's not ogg/vorbis or flac or vp3 or ...
However, Luis was talking about implementations, not the codecs 'on
themselves'. We try to include opensource implementations (code) for
each codec out there, as far as these exist.

We allow for properietary plugins to be loaded, though. Their license is
marked as non-GPL/-LGPL in the registry, and someone could add the few
needed lines of code to check against this before loading the plugin.
That way, it won't load any proprietary code, even though it is
installed. This might work for GPL apps (which might not be allowed to
load non-GPL-compatible code; <insert ianal disclaimer here>).

But 'true' opensource addicts wouldn't even install those plugins, as
you'll understand. Common formats are supported through opensource
codecs. The 'big' ones that haven't been rev. engineered yet are WMV9
and (hmm...) Real > RV10 (video).

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer